It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days.
They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji.
They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom.
The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was.
But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.
It's not like reddit is particularly well optimized for phones, in the mobile site or the app. Their mobile versions are unusable and if it weren't for third party apps I'd have given up reddit entirely.
Reddit should fit nicely into a mobile first site with good desktop functionality, it's just their useless team of designers.
It's okay. You, like me, are starting to realize that our way of computing is becoming obsolete. How many kids are using keyboard and mouse vs touch screens? They grow up thinking "this is how you use a computer". To them the mouse/keyboard ruins the whole touch(mobile) experience.
One day we'll be the old men yelling at internet clouds while sitting behind an old PC or some kind of open source terminal running an open source OS and weeping for the past.
Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now:
1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive).
2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back.
On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.
You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc.
It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit.
Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit.
So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.
I think you’re right about the Facebook transition, especially with the design shifting to one more closely matching Facebook.
The dark horse, in my opinion, is spectrum.chat. It is fast, beautiful and being iterated on daily. It is also open source and open to feedback. The real time chat combines the best of discord and slack and the design is a step up from both of those and it.
It might not be a direct replacement to Reddit, but I think it could steal some traffic as it develops. Plus it is driven by a revenue model based on subscribers, not ads, sidestepping the current FB public relations issues.
Why should all these things be centralized, though? Before Reddit, there were disparate forums with different rules and structures - Reddit organized and unified them, but is now applying changes that make forums non-viable as a reddit use-case.
From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it, especially Reddit’s most passionate users, who have been very articulate, consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don’t like, and Reddit just keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view.
Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.
Of course it's about monetization. There's a difference between how Reddit-the-company (and its investors) view the site, and how its users do.
It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively remove electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to increase turnover.
I remember the Slashdot redesign and the Fark redesign too, and now this one. The general pattern is the site owners’ unwavering certainty that the redesign is great and everyone is wrong, in the face of vocal criticism from users. Remember “You’ll get over it”?
EDIT: I’d love to see actual measured metrics published showing a particular design change actually making sense. Is the new one faster for any particular task? Does it generate more signups? More revenue? Not saying these guys didn’t measure this, but publishing the results would be fascinating.
Is there an example of a site who rolled out a big redesign and then actually reversed course based on end user feedback?
I don't get it. What exactly is changing? From the screenshots from the reddit post about it, it looks.... like reddit. There's posts and the posts have upvote/downvote buttons, and there's a link to the comments that shows how many there are. Am I missing something? The OP article doesn't actually have any screenshots of changes, and I made it several paragraphs into the article still not understanding what is changing.
You should be able to interact with the redesign directly at https://new.reddit.com. The main complaints I've seen leveled at the redesign are: user profiles becoming more like Facebook profiles, the new chat functionality missing core features, and the newly created "best" ranking becoming the default.
Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.
I dropped the mobile app because it was occupying over 200MB of space, and my inadequately equipped iPhone ran out of space. I switched to the mobile site, but now avoid that as well due to the constant, in-your-face app promotion. Every website with a mobile app these days:
"I get it, you have an app, I don't want the app, stop telling me to download it."
Edit: Thanks for the helpful replies - however staying completely off Reddit is probably better for my overall wellbeing. Reddit is no longer a "happy place" for me, the racists, trolls, shills, and bigots have ruined it for me. To top it off, I was recently banned by admins (not mods) for "attempting to evade a subbreddit ban" which was a result of my using a VPN - no thanks.
This gives the old reddit mobile experience, which is far lighter and better. But some things are broken, e.g. "submit" is broken; "parent" take you to the modern mobile version (but "conext" works); "sidebar" needs a separate page.
To any reddit admins reading: please don't take this functionality away.
Their mobile app rarely works for me. There was a bug for a few months(!) where I couldn't log in. It worked again for a month, and now the app can't connect to the server at all.
To be clear, I'm running this on a brand new iPhone X, so I've got plenty of power to run the app. The site works in my mobile browser, but the app has serious reliability problems.
If anyone at Reddit is reading this, please stop pushing the mobile app so hard. You're actively making things worse by pushing a highly unreliable app!
Also, please make it possible to sort by "Rising" on the mobile site and app (should I ever be able to connect again). On busy news days, things move fast enough that "Rising" is the only way to keep up, yet the option is mysteriously inaccessible on mobile.
They have also periodically been A/B testing a popup with only two options, login or get mobile app, when clicking on a topic -- as far as I could tell it was not possible to just pass to the comment thread. Luckily that seems to have been phased out.
I completely agree and even when you just accept all this and actually get the App, it is pretty terrible (on IOS).
As in, it stops loading posts, and stops infinite scrolling, so you have to basically kill the app, then go back into it.
I don't see how that is more useful than the website or a better experience.
Also another issue is that many links just don't work. I can't see `streamable` and many others because the page that opens has no touch detection. I have to select `...` then go to `Open in Safari` to make it work.
Reddit and YouTube are the only things stopping my IPad from gathering dust.
It's because they want your device's advertiser ID so they can associate it with your interests based on subreddits you visit. There's gold in them ad targeting data hills.
I never download "the app" because I know the privacy and security settings of my browser will not apply there and everything on my phone will get hoovered.
Try i.reddit.com. I still use it, and I'm still annoyed to no end when the "modern" mobile website loads instead, with its ~5 second splash screen that loads less information than the former does in goddamn instant.
I think that's now removed no? Or at least, I haven't noticed it for a while.
I got hit with the Google hammer regarding a similar banner, where they threatened to stop indexing the site completely, so I assume they had a similar message. Or maybe they're large enough to be exempt. I don't know.
I use one of the third party apps. I tried the official app but it forces you to open external links in their embedded chrome/webview. The third party simply opens them in my browser.
A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.
To me Digg died with the AACS censorship debacle. In hindsight, I understand Kevin Rose was trying to protect Digg from lawsuits that would effectively destroy the site, but the censorship did the same.
Purely from a user perspective I personally love the new Reddit design, I don't find it detracts much from the previous design at all. BUT I use a top-end Macbook Pro and I find the new design to be terribly slow and a performance hog, where it simply kills the UX.
Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/
I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.
Agreed. The design aesthetic actually works but the technical overhead in implementing is the problem. HN works so well because not only does it prioritize information density but it consumes less resources. The Reddit redesign pushes thumbnails, infinite scroll, and a useless right sidebar.
Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.
Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like this.
Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc.
The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading.
(Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal.
I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?
> I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?
Gmail has done major overhauls all in one go. So has Dropbox. Google calendars. Google earth. Apple's main site. Most newspaper's sites. Bitbucket. Facebook has had several. All of these have irritated some portion of users who decried the death of the product, yet eventually people get used to it. I think it works more often than not.
And if we went suddenly from Amazon of five years ago[1] to the Amazon of today I don't think there would be that much of an uproar. It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes.
As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem. Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users.
Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.
> As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem.
Even if they intend to keep the old design available forever (very unlikely), it means that they now have the same number of developers supporting twice as much UI. So obviously that means they will not be able to deliver bug fixes as rapidly, etc.
I unfortunately saw this weeks ago. I did the checkbox accepting being in the Beta program.
At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page.
It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn off beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no.
All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.
What browser are you on? new.reddit.com works just fine on updated Firefox... biggest annoyance is the lack of sidebars on subreddits, apparently they need to be enabled by the mods.
All I wanted to see is what the comments section now looks like. It's literally the only thing I'm there for, and preview photos never show it. (My biggest complaint with many HN app previews too)
Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this:
Frustrating to discuss this on reddit as well. They always think we should watch and eait but that rarely works. Especially if they already added huge banners advertising their data collecting app and now autoplaying videos, before people complained they also autoplayed them with sound..
This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.
The redesign adds a bit of lag from all the javascript and extra elements. The old plain text + expanding comments + images/gifs is much smoother and includes everything that's needed
There is certain design by committee feeling at new redesing, its like they are putting everything there chat, share, follow, fancy sidebar, options and more.
I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption. People already view Twitter as a source of news, no reason they wouldn't accept Reddit as a news media as well.
I don't think so. Most content on the frontpage is pictures and videos, not news. They added image and video hosting relatively recently so users wouldn't leave the site while consuming media. They can't do that with news
Reddit gave me the opportunity to try the new layout, and I lasted exactly 1 minute before reverting. The log in page was broken. I could see where to sign up for a new account, but could not see area to log in for existing users.
The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website.
If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.
There are no mistakes in it. This was planned years ago, they spent a lot of time evaluating different technologies and UI mockups. I'm interested to see if AMA with Barak Obama will be still readable, or will start consuming gigabytes of RAM.
The long bar (beneath the upvote/downvote buttons) that shows what level the current comment is at collapses comments by clicking it. Very unintuitive, and I only found it by accident.
Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit without regret, and get lost in for hours.
With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like.
Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook.
But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.
Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?
The design reminds me too much of the native iOS Reddit app; fine for mobile, but I really do not like it for desktop. It is absolutely annoying to me.
in other news how is their new profile design going? I keep adding /overview to mine and other profiles to be able to actually click on things . Why do they keep breaking functionality for no apparent reason? It's becoming a theme in many high-traffic websites (google adsense, analytics come to mind), it's as if new managers roll in and decide to piss all around their territory.
I thought it was digg v4 that was Digg's undoing. Which was taken over by...Reddit. I guess its time for some other community site to take over. Maybe those Amino apps.
I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough.
I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.
I'm with you on the JS stuff, the redesign screams "I want to be an app!" so desperately, I'm seriously considering leaving after a good 8 years on the site as well. Everything has that Javascript-delay on it, like it takes 0.5 seconds to click anything, scroll anything, etc.
I gotta say though:
>increased censorship
That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit which simply should not be on a mainstream website (which reddit simply is now). I don't see any idealistic reason to keep /r/fatpeoplehate. The "everything that's legal" ideal is cute for some edgy website you create out of college, but a platform of reddit's size simply gives too much room for content to fall on the wrong side of the line.
I started using it after slashdot, digg and so on descended into noise and in particular after digg's universally hated redesign. There too site owners were deaf to user
complaints. Reddit seems bent on learning the same lesson.
It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?
Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked the addiction.
All downvoting does is enforce 'crowd-think'. You could never picture it today, but back in 2012, /r/politics was much more central then it was today (still left leaning, but you could actually find differing opinions). But soon after that election, anyone who disagreed would get downvoted into oblivion, and eventually those people stop posting. And what you're left with is today's /r/politics.
You can see this in a lot of topic related subreddits, if something is extremely popular, you'll get downvoted for calling out any faults. Eventually people just stop posting.
I can't down vote your comment, but if I could, I would. It isn't constructive to the conversation at hand.
But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject matter.
jacques_chester|8 years ago
It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days.
They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji.
They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom.
The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was.
But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.
Aoyagi|8 years ago
fwsgonzo|8 years ago
flukus|8 years ago
Reddit should fit nicely into a mobile first site with good desktop functionality, it's just their useless team of designers.
djhworld|8 years ago
MisterTea|8 years ago
One day we'll be the old men yelling at internet clouds while sitting behind an old PC or some kind of open source terminal running an open source OS and weeping for the past.
StellarTabi|8 years ago
1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive).
2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back.
On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.
2bitencryption|8 years ago
It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit.
Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit.
So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.
chrisfrantz|8 years ago
The dark horse, in my opinion, is spectrum.chat. It is fast, beautiful and being iterated on daily. It is also open source and open to feedback. The real time chat combines the best of discord and slack and the design is a step up from both of those and it.
It might not be a direct replacement to Reddit, but I think it could steal some traffic as it develops. Plus it is driven by a revenue model based on subscribers, not ads, sidestepping the current FB public relations issues.
ameister14|8 years ago
unknown|8 years ago
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unknown|8 years ago
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rthomas6|8 years ago
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dgreensp|8 years ago
Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.
TeMPOraL|8 years ago
It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively remove electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to increase turnover.
ryandrake|8 years ago
EDIT: I’d love to see actual measured metrics published showing a particular design change actually making sense. Is the new one faster for any particular task? Does it generate more signups? More revenue? Not saying these guys didn’t measure this, but publishing the results would be fascinating.
Is there an example of a site who rolled out a big redesign and then actually reversed course based on end user feedback?
unknown|8 years ago
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joemi|8 years ago
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Izkata|8 years ago
vesinisa|8 years ago
josefresco|8 years ago
Edit: Thanks for the helpful replies - however staying completely off Reddit is probably better for my overall wellbeing. Reddit is no longer a "happy place" for me, the racists, trolls, shills, and bigots have ruined it for me. To top it off, I was recently banned by admins (not mods) for "attempting to evade a subbreddit ban" which was a result of my using a VPN - no thanks.
liotier|8 years ago
hyperpallium|8 years ago
Starter pack: https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact https://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.compact
This gives the old reddit mobile experience, which is far lighter and better. But some things are broken, e.g. "submit" is broken; "parent" take you to the modern mobile version (but "conext" works); "sidebar" needs a separate page.
To any reddit admins reading: please don't take this functionality away.
actsasbuffoon|8 years ago
To be clear, I'm running this on a brand new iPhone X, so I've got plenty of power to run the app. The site works in my mobile browser, but the app has serious reliability problems.
If anyone at Reddit is reading this, please stop pushing the mobile app so hard. You're actively making things worse by pushing a highly unreliable app!
Also, please make it possible to sort by "Rising" on the mobile site and app (should I ever be able to connect again). On busy news days, things move fast enough that "Rising" is the only way to keep up, yet the option is mysteriously inaccessible on mobile.
josteink|8 years ago
Somewhere under preferences you can disable this bullshit forever.
The website is still a travesty though.
Vinnl|8 years ago
Yes, you'd expect it to be gone after the first time you dismiss it, but you will probably still want to know that you can remove it :)
ChrisSD|8 years ago
I'm sure this is fun for people who use reddit regularly but as only an occasional visitor I would rather do without it.
zmb_|8 years ago
Fifer82|8 years ago
As in, it stops loading posts, and stops infinite scrolling, so you have to basically kill the app, then go back into it.
I don't see how that is more useful than the website or a better experience.
Also another issue is that many links just don't work. I can't see `streamable` and many others because the page that opens has no touch detection. I have to select `...` then go to `Open in Safari` to make it work.
Reddit and YouTube are the only things stopping my IPad from gathering dust.
nimbix|8 years ago
dredmorbius|8 years ago
Unfortunately intra-reddit links cause all the usual problems.
But yes, mobile behaviour is rage-inducing.
api|8 years ago
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baby|8 years ago
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dmix|8 years ago
Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/
I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.
orky56|8 years ago
Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.
radiorental|8 years ago
Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc.
The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading.
(Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal.
I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?
542458|8 years ago
Gmail has done major overhauls all in one go. So has Dropbox. Google calendars. Google earth. Apple's main site. Most newspaper's sites. Bitbucket. Facebook has had several. All of these have irritated some portion of users who decried the death of the product, yet eventually people get used to it. I think it works more often than not.
And if we went suddenly from Amazon of five years ago[1] to the Amazon of today I don't think there would be that much of an uproar. It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon...
iampims|8 years ago
intended|8 years ago
siddboots|8 years ago
s_dev|8 years ago
Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.
gedy|8 years ago
And I suspect bigger, more visible ads/paid content
shawnz|8 years ago
Even if they intend to keep the old design available forever (very unlikely), it means that they now have the same number of developers supporting twice as much UI. So obviously that means they will not be able to deliver bug fixes as rapidly, etc.
ploggingdev|8 years ago
KarenSatantsby|8 years ago
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crankylinuxuser|8 years ago
At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page.
It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn off beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no.
All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.
Max_Mustermann|8 years ago
Redoubts|8 years ago
Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this:
https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk
teddyfrozevelt|8 years ago
https://imgur.com/a/RfioM
crowbahr|8 years ago
brynjolf|8 years ago
nhangen|8 years ago
Consultant32452|8 years ago
This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.
adjunctme|8 years ago
atupis|8 years ago
bkovacev|8 years ago
mrweasel|8 years ago
TremendousJudge|8 years ago
rabboRubble|8 years ago
The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website.
If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.
dotcoma|8 years ago
akerro|8 years ago
chaoticmass|8 years ago
noxToken|8 years ago
pknopf|8 years ago
That would be a huge issue if they really did that. RES will probably step in and fix that.
spiderfarmer|8 years ago
FridgeSeal|8 years ago
sidkhanooja|8 years ago
With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like.
Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook.
But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.
agumonkey|8 years ago
mantas|8 years ago
ra88it|8 years ago
beejiu|8 years ago
krtkush|8 years ago
http://new.reddit.com/
tluyben2|8 years ago
return1|8 years ago
digi_owl|8 years ago
gm-conspiracy|8 years ago
sreyaNotfilc|8 years ago
reiichiroh|8 years ago
superkuh|8 years ago
I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.
nothis|8 years ago
I gotta say though:
>increased censorship
That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit which simply should not be on a mainstream website (which reddit simply is now). I don't see any idealistic reason to keep /r/fatpeoplehate. The "everything that's legal" ideal is cute for some edgy website you create out of college, but a platform of reddit's size simply gives too much room for content to fall on the wrong side of the line.
technofiend|8 years ago
bluedevil2k|8 years ago
justherefortart|8 years ago
Reddit started sucking the larger it got. It was decent from 2005-2010, been a shitfest since and increasingly getting worse.
The early flame wars were fun though when they first got comments working.
cup-of-tea|8 years ago
ApolloFortyNine|8 years ago
You can see this in a lot of topic related subreddits, if something is extremely popular, you'll get downvoted for calling out any faults. Eventually people just stop posting.
andybak|8 years ago
ataturk|8 years ago
[deleted]
MikkoFinell|8 years ago
slap_shot|8 years ago
But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject matter.
zyx321|8 years ago
The type of content that Reddit's design encourages most would be meme-blogging in the style of r/me_IRL
Vovka19|8 years ago